Most professional/enterprise quality MQ monitoring or administration apps - like QPasa or AppWatch - can be used to save the queue contents.

Most professional/enterprise quality MQ monitoring or administration apps - like Qpasa or AppWatch - are too complicated and expensive to implement JUST to save the contents of a queue._________________I am *not* the model of the modern major general.

It depends on whether you're using "qload" or "q". From memory "qload" will save it as text, "q" will save it as binary.

So is the case that q is used when the middleware needs to take a snapshot of the current states of its queues so that it can later be reloaded...
and qload is used by administrators to store messages in human readable form?...